inflation

Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, announced today that the Fed will embark on another round of Quantitative Easing, beginning immediately. The Fed will increase its holdings by an estimated $85 billion per month in securities, about half of which will be long-term Treasury bonds, and the remaining $40 billion or more will be agency mortgage-backed securities. The agency paper will be purchased with new cash, while the long-term Treasuries will be acquired in exchange for short-term Treasury paper, as a continuation of Operation Twist.

There is no ultimate target amount or end date specified for this round of easing. Essentially, the Fed will buy or exchange $1 trillion in securities per year, until chairman Bernanke says to stop. It is completely open-ended. Additionally, the Fed expects to keep interest rates at or near 0% until sometime in 2015.

Let’s be clear about what this announcement means: The Fed will print $500 billion per year in new money, and inject it into the economy by buying agency paper (Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, et al.), while also flooding the market with $500 billion of short-term paper in exchange for long bonds. That new money is not based on any realistic estimate of economic growth, or economic requirement to expand the money supply. It is pure, Keynesian monetary stimulus.

This will, of course, be done in a completely responsible way, and there is no threat whatsoever that this will cause an increase in inflation, and in any case, the Fed is fully prepared to sterilize this move at any time conditions warrant. Seriously, it’s best for the Fed to do this, and nothing could possibly go wrong.

Ever since the Fed began the first round of what is now called Quantitative easing, massively expanding the money supply, I’ve been worried about what would happen when demand began rising, and the Fed had to somehow try and draw all that extra cash out of the economy before it became inflationary—or even worse—hyperinflationary.

That’s still a worry for me, because I have, let us say, less than absolute confidence that Chairman Bernanke and his colleagues can pull that monetary sterilization off without a misstep.

Happily, that is becoming a secondary worry for me. Unhappily, that’s because it’s been replaced by a new worry, articulated by Paul Brodsky, bond market expert and co-founder of QB Asset Management. Mr. Brodsky maintains that the real inflationary danger lies elsewhere. I mean, it still lies at at the Fed and other Central Banks, but for a different reason.

The world has simply gotten itself into too much debt. There are creditors that expect to be paid, and debtors that are having an increasingly difficult time making their coupon payments. No amount of political or policy intervention is going to change that reality. (Unless a global "debt jubilee" transpires, which Paul thinks is unlikely).

Looking at the global monetary base, Paul sees it dwarfed by the staggering amount of debts that need to be repaid or serviced. The reckless use of leverage has resulted in a chasm between total credit and the money that can service it.

So how will this debt overhang be resolved?

Central bank money printing — and lots of it — thinks Paul.

The problem has been exacerbated by the fact that, when faced with an economic depression brought on by the collapse of a debt bubble—mainly in mortgages—the preferred policy solution pushed by governments all over the world, has been to try and re-inflate the debt bubble via stimulus spending. That is to say, overcoming the collapse of the mortgage debt bubble by creating a new, even bigger, sovereign debt bubble.

We have a pretty good idea of how much money there is in the world. We also have an idea of how much debt there is, from the sovereign debt of the united states, to credit cardholders in Finland. And it appears that there is not enough of the former, to pay off all the debts contained in the latter. If so, then that means a lot of banks—perhaps most of them—are in trouble. And we can’t have that.

What policy makers do not want to see is bank asset deterioration. That would lead to all sorts of bad things. You would see banks fail. You would see bank systems fail. You would see debtors fail and it would just feed on itself in an accelerating fashion. And so monetary policy makers have no choice but to deleverage in the other way, which is to colloquially print money; to manufacture electronic credits and call them bank reserves.

And to the degree that that extends into the private sector where debtors begin to fail en masse, that would increase failures of the bank assets in turn. And it would end the mortgage bond securities market, for example, and the leveraged loan markets, and end the private sector shadow banking system. So it does not work for anybody to have credit deteriorate. The only way to deleverage an economy is as we are saying: to create new base money with which to do it.

In other words, if central banks want to prevent entire banking systems from failing due to the collapse of the debts they hold as assets, they have no choice but to ensure that there is enough money available for everyone to meet their debt payments. To do that, they have to start printing out long sheets of beautifully engraved C-Notes. This will, of course, lead to massive inflation that will allow everyone to pay off their mortgages for the cost of a nice hat, while, at the same time, destroying the value of the world’s life savings.

This will clean up everyone’s balance sheets, and allow the world to create a brand new monetary base—let’s call it New Dollars—which, central banks having learned their lessons, will be impossible to over-borrow or inflate.

One of the key worries about the Federal Reserve’s policy of Quantitative Easing has been the fear that it would result in hyperinflation at some point. But, Mike Shedlock, writing at Business Insider, asserts that inflation is not what we should be fearing: deflation is. Despite his rather self-centered, Ooh-look-what-a-cool-boy-I-am writing style, he makes an excellent point, and provides some valuable insight.

Shedlock actually has a rather different definition of inflation and deflation than most do, as he doesn’t concentrate primarily on the money supply or price levels, but rather the state of credit markets.

InflationInflation is a net increase in money supply and credit, with credit marked-to-market.

DeflationDeflation is a net decrease in money supply and credit, with credit marked-to-market.

HyperinflationComplete loss of faith in currency.

The first two definitions have nothing to do with prices per se, the third does (by implication of currency becoming worthless).

To determine whether we are currently experiencing inflation or deflation, he uses the following criterion:

Symptoms of Deflation

Falling Credit Marked-to-Market

Falling Treasury Yields

Falling Home Prices

Rising Corporate Bond Yields

Rising Dollar

Falling Commodity Prices

Falling Consumer Prices

Rising Unemployment

Negative GDP

Falling Stock Market

Spiking Base Money Supply

Banks Hoarding Cash

Rising Savings Rate

Purchasing Power of Gold Rises

Rising Number of Bank Failures

He then goes through all 15 criteria and shows fairly persuasively that—according to his definition, at least—we are in the middle of a credit-led deflation, despite the fact that consumer prices are rising. certainly, asset prices are declining.

Which, I think just means we’re having stagflation, if today’s CPI numbers are to be beleived.

In any event, as I’ve been saying since 2008, the danger of our policy mix is not inflation in the short-term, but rather a recreation of the Japanese response to the currency crisis/deflation of 1992 that brought about the "Lost Decade". We’ve actually doubled down on the Japanese policy, and are experiencing the same economic result.

So, businesses and consumers are holding tight to their wallets, adjusting their balance sheets…and waiting. Yes, there’s tons of cash sitting in banks right now that isn’t going anywhere, and as long as banks have a shortage of credit-worthy customers seeking loans, all of that cash is gonna keep sitting there are excess reserves.

Meanwhile, the one thing that has kept the dollar buoyed as the world’s reserve currency is that there’s really nowhere else to go. As attractive as the Euro might have seemed a couple of years ago, there’s a real chance that the Euro is on it’s way out, except perhaps as the joint currency of France and Germany.

What I would point out, though, is that Shedlock’s definition of hyperinflation is a state that exists as a result of a psychological event, not the result of something one can forecast via some predictive empirical measurement. That’s unsettling, because you can never quite predict when a psychological breaking point in public trust is reached. No matter how deflationary credit might be at the moment, if we begin seeing a serious, sustained rise in price levels for consumer goods, I’d be a little worried. A steep fall of the dollar’s price in the FOREX market would be worrisome, too. If hyperinflation is the result of a psychological shock disconnected with any sort of statistical measurement, then I’d be careful finding too much comfort in statistics.

The numbers say that deflation is our biggest problem right now, though, and I’d say that’s generally right. If the economy picks up and those excess reserves begin to flow into the hands of consumers though, I’d be looking very hard at the Fed as the velocity of money picks up, to see how they plan to sterilize the excessive growth in the monetary base they’ve created.

The "new normal" is a term coined by the brain trust at the giant bond fund PIMCO. Anthony Crescenzi, a PIMCO vice president, strategist and portfolio manager, is part of that brain trust.

"The difference between 2 percent growth and 3 percent growth is of major importance and has major implications for the entire economy, for financial markets, for the budget," he says. And the heart of the problem is job creation.

Crescenzi and his colleagues argue that the U.S. economy could actually grow 2 percent a year without adding any new jobs. That’s because the productivity of current workers is rising at about 2 percent a year. "In other words a company can produce 2 percent more goods and/or services a year even if it doesn’t increase the number of people it employs," he says.

Smaller Incomes Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, thinks some new jobs would be added in an economy growing 2 percent a year, but far fewer than one growing 3 percent. "In a 3 percent world we’d create roughly 1.6 million jobs a year," he says. But he says that in a 2 percent world, job creation would be less than half — around 700,000 jobs.

Meanwhile, in China, growth hit 9.5%. So what is China doing, policy wise, that the US isn’t? Well, for one thing it is encouraging businesses and has established a positive business climate. Additionally, it isn’t borrowing money to pump into some black hole it calls “stimulus” at a rate faster than we’ve seen in recent history. Etc.

It’s pretty bad when you have to look to China to point out what the US should be doing. As Henry Kissinger recently said, the Chinese used to think we had the financial side of things pretty much figured out. Then this mess and resultant stupidity in reaction to it. The one thing we should have had the inside track on, we didn’t, because we chose to recreate the failed policies of the Hoover/FDR era without a world war to finally pull us out of the mess (or at least I hope that’s the case).

Is this the “new normal” as Crescenzi claims? PIMCO, btw, is the world’s largest bond fund (almost 2 trillion). PIMCO also recently announced that it would no longer be buying US debt.

Some Fed officials at the June meeting also said additional monetary stimulus would be appropriate “if economic growth remained too slow to make satisfactory progress toward reducing the unemployment rate and if inflation returned to relatively low levels after the effects of recent transitory shocks dissipated,” according to the minutes.

Really?

So they are considering a “QE3”? Note the change from “last August” to now.

Last August, when Bernanke signaled in a speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that the Fed would embark on a second round of Treasury bond purchases, employers were cutting jobs, pushing up the unemployment rate to 9.6 percent. The weakness in the economy prompted Bernanke to focus on the possibility of deflation, or a broad-based drop in prices and asset values including homes and stocks.

The economy is in better shape now than in August, though hiring remains “frustratingly slow,” Bernanke said at a June 22 news conference. Employers added 18,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, the fewest in nine months, the government reported last week.

Is the economy in “better shape now than in August”? I say ‘no’. And so do most of the economic indicators. Dr. Robert Barro, Paul M Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University makes it clear where the current policy is leading:

Turning to quantitative easing, he warned that the US and UK are storing up inflation and that the Bank of England may be too complacent. Although there is no threat to inflation now, he said: "You have to have an exit strategy. Ben Bernanke [chairman of the US Federal Reserve] and [Bank Governor] Mervyn King are aware of this, but I think they are a little over confident about how they can accomplish it. Because you want to have this exit strategy without having a lot of inflation.

"That’s when the inflation would occur. If there’s a recovery and there’s all this liquidity and somehow the central bank has to reverse it."

That’s precisely where this is all headed – somehow at, at some point, the Fed has to wring out all this money it pumped into the economy. And that stored up inflation is likely to explode during that process – a real economy killer. Barro is saying he has little confidence in the Fed, deeming them “over confident” in their ability to do that while avoiding letting the inflation dragon out of the cage.

Meanwhile, in Europe …

Yeah, it’s a mess. And given the propensity of our policy makers to recreate the policies of the Great Depression, I don’t see it getting better any time soon. So yes, for at least the foreseeable future, the “new normal” may be 9.2% unemployment. Because there is still no reason or incentive for US businesses to take the chance of expanding and hiring in such an uncertain economic atmosphere.

Until they are much more confident in the policies of this administration and the Federal Reserve, few if any are going to change the status quo.

As China’s middle class expands and as its business and manufacturing sector continue to grow, it is driving the price of commodities higher because of increased aggregate demand for relatively scarce commodities:

While China’s GDP is only 9.4% of the global economy, and its population is 19% of the world population…

Cement demand represents 53.2% of global demand

Iron ore = 47.7%

Coal = 46.9%

Pigs = 46.4%

Steel = 45.4%

Lead = 44.6%

Zinc = 41.3%

Aluminum = 40.6%

Copper = 38.9%

Eggs = 37.2%

Nickel = 36.3%

Some of that demand is relatively stable, like food consumption. The world’s largest country has a middle class that can afford meat for the first time…..

Obviously this means that competition for these commodities will push prices higher and higher. It is these sorts of numbers that cause me to doubt seriously those who claim inflation is not a threat. Certainly the price for commodities is going to go up based on nothing more than China’s demand. And if it costs more for those commodities, that means costs for products based on them are going to rise as well – everywhere. Add in the money supply woes (i.e. literally dumping trillions in dollars into the economy to no real effect) and debt problems and you have a mix of reasons why, while it may not be evident just yet, inflation seems to be a certainty in our near future.

UPDATE: More on food commodities. Interesting article. Much that is produced in China in terms of grain is going toward feeding livestock. So that puts even more pressure on costs for grain, etc.

China was until recently self-sufficient in soybeans, for example. But now they are producing the same amount as they always have (15 million metric tons) but importing 3 times that to keep up. Corn, wheat and rice are headed in the same direction:

Xiaoping said that most of the land in China that can be farmed profitably is already under cultivation and that available land is actually shrinking in the face of development. In addition, yields are beginning to plateau, he said, with little expectation of major gains.

He said he expects China to increasingly import corn to keep up with demand resulting in part from dietary changes and its use in producing biofuels.

Now evidence is emerging that the damage wrought by the sour economy is more widespread than just a few careers led astray or postponed. Even for college graduates — the people who were most protected from the slings and arrows of recession — the outlook is rather bleak.

Employment rates for new college graduates have fallen sharply in the last two years, as have starting salaries for those who can find work. What’s more, only half of the jobs landed by these new graduates even require a college degree, reviving debates about whether higher education is “worth it” after all.

Of course in any economic downturn, especially in one which unemployment is high, this sort of thing is going to happen. According to the NY Times story, 22.4% of recent graduates are not working. 22% are not working in jobs that require a college degree. And, of course, of the 55.6% who are working in jobs requiring a degree, many are not working in their degree area. It also appears that the median salary has dropped significantly during the recession – after all, it’s a buyer’s market:

The median starting salary for students graduating from four-year colleges in 2009 and 2010 was $27,000, down from $30,000 for those who entered the work force in 2006 to 2008, according to a study released on Wednesday by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. That is a decline of 10 percent, even before taking inflation into account.

That’s a significant drop and again, it makes the argument that going to work for 4 years instead of college may have two benefits: 1) no college loan debt and 2) 4 year work history which would most likely see a salary or earnings well above the median starting salary for college students. And as might be expected, it is those college students who are graduates from liberal arts programs who are suffering most.

The choice of major is quite important. Certain majors had better luck finding a job that required a college degree, according to an analysis by Andrew M. Sum, an economist at Northeastern University, of 2009 Labor Department data for college graduates under 25.

Young graduates who majored in education and teaching or engineering were most likely to find a job requiring a college degree, while area studies majors — those who majored in Latin American studies, for example — and humanities majors were least likely to do so. Among all recent education graduates, 71.1 percent were in jobs that required a college degree; of all area studies majors, the share was 44.7 percent.

So what sort of jobs are those who are degreed but not working in a job requiring a degree holding?

An analysis by The New York Times of Labor Department data about college graduates aged 25 to 34 found that the number of these workers employed in food service, restaurants and bars had risen 17 percent in 2009 from 2008, though the sample size was small. There were similar or bigger employment increases at gas stations and fuel dealers, food and alcohol stores, and taxi and limousine services.

Of course that has a ripple effect in which less-educated workers may be displaced.

“The less schooling you had, the more likely you were to get thrown out of the labor market altogether,” said Mr. Sum, noting that unemployment rates for high school graduates and dropouts are always much higher than those for college graduates. “There is complete displacement all the way down.”

Obviously the lesson here is education is still valuable, the question however is “how valuable”? Valuable enough to commit to the tremendous debt a college degree can bring? It is that sort of ROI that young people must begin making – especially those considering liberal arts programs. Assuming a desire by most who attend college to use their credentials to get a high paying job and secure a better future than foregoing such a program of study has to be under scrutiny by those in such a situation.

Opting to begin work out of high school vs. pursuing a college degree may become a real possibility. And naturally that will have another ripple effect. Colleges and universities will see decreased attendance which will in turn mean less revenue and possibly spur competition among them to attract students.

I actually see that as a beneficial effect, especially given the cost of higher education today, that may eventually make the ROI work somewhat better for potential college students. It is obvious the cost of higher education has risen much higher than any inflation rate. That’s a bubble that needs to be popped and popped rather quickly. Dropping enrollment because of a perception of not receiving the value for what is paid may be the motivator for higher education to cut their prices or suffer the consequences.

As a reminder, if you are an iTunes user, don’t forget to subscribe to the QandO podcast, Observations, through iTunes. For those of you who don’t have iTunes, you can subscribe at Podcast Alley. And, of course, for you newsreader subscriber types, our podcast RSS Feed is here. For podcasts from 2005 to 2010, they can be accessed through the RSS Archive Feed.

As a reminder, if you are an iTunes user, don’t forget to subscribe to the QandO podcast, Observations, through iTunes. For those of you who don’t have iTunes, you can subscribe at Podcast Alley. And, of course, for you newsreader subscriber types, our podcast RSS Feed is here. For podcasts from 2005 to 2010, they can be accessed through the RSS Archive Feed.

In the Financial Times today, Martin Wolf comes out swinging (free registration required) against those who are afraid the Fed’s Quantitative Easing programs carry a danger of sparking serious inflation.

The essence of the contemporary monetary system is creation of money, out of nothing, by private banks’ often foolish lending. Why is such privatisation of a public function right and proper, but action by the central bank, to meet pressing public need, a road to catastrophe? When banks will not lend and the broad money supply is barely growing, that is just what it should be doing (see chart).

The hysterics then add that it is impossible to shrink the Fed’s balance sheet fast enough to prevent excessive monetary expansion. That is also nonsense. If the economy took off, nothing would be easier. Indeed, the Fed explained precisely what it would do in its monetary report to Congress last July. If the worst came to the worst, it could just raise reserve requirements. Since many of its critics believe in 100 per cent reserve banking, why should they object to a move in that direction?

Now turn to the argument that the Fed is deliberately weakening the dollar. Any moderately aware person knows that the Fed’s mandate does not include the external value of the dollar. Those governments that have piled up an extra $6,800bn in foreign reserves since January 2000, much of it in dollars, are consenting adults. Not only did no one ask China, the foremost example, to add the huge sum of $2,400bn to its reserves, but many strongly asked it not to do so.

Everything he says is correct, but that’s not really any help, because the implications are pretty severe, even if he’s completely right.

First, let’s assume the Fed can, via repos or changes in reserve requirements, sterilize the increase in the money supply. The problem then becomes when does the Fed do this sterilization. let’s go back to 1981-1982. When the Fed was looking at monetary aggregates in the wake of the 1981 recession, they saw the money supply growing far faster than their target. At the time, the Fed’s primary tool was securities sales and purchases to control the rate of growth in the money supply directly, while letting the markets set interest rates. (Today, the fed primarily uses changes in the Discount Rate and Federal Funds target rate to run monetary policy.)

When the Fed saw those big increases in money supply, they immediately moved to sterilize the increases, to keep inflation in check. Sadly, the lack of velocity in the money supply, i.e., its actual rate of use in transactions, was near zero. as a result, the Fed’s tightening threw the economy into another recession, with unemployment rising to 11%. The policy may have been correct, but the timing was wrong.

So, what guarantee do we have that the Fed will perform sterilization at precisely the right time? If they move too early, the economy shuts down, a la 1982. Too late, and inflation takes off. Then the Fed would really have to tighten, which would probably result in another recession to wring out the extra inflation.

The trouble with the Fed is that monetary policy moves take 6-18 months to fully percolate through the economy. And they make these decisions based on economic data gathered in previous months. It’s like driving down the street by looking only at the rear-view mirror.

That makes proper timing by the Fed…hard.

Perhaps the Fed will operate as if run by infinitely wise solons, who know precisely when to sterilize their quantitative easing, either through repo operations, or raising the banks’ reserve requirements appropriately.

If it doesn’t, however, we’re looking at either another steep recession, or a bout of serious inflation, follwed by another serious recession to tame the inflation.

Oh, and even if the Fed is that good, it doesn’t address the problem of how the Chinese will react to any increased currency risk they face by holding dollar-denominated securities if the value of the dollar falls in the FOREX. As Mr. Wolf admits, the Fed’s mandate has nothing to do with the foreign exchange value of the dollar. So, maybe, the Chinese will decide to sell as much of their holdings in Treasuries as they can. That implies a serious decline in treasury prices, and a concommittant rise in bond yields, i.e., interest rates. Aaaand, we’re back to a possibility of a steep recession again Especially if they do it while the Fed is already in the middle of money supply sterilization operations.

So, I guess the question is, “How much to you trust in the ability of the Federal Reserve to do exactly the right thing, at exactly the right time?” And, “How much do you trust the Chinese to go along with all this?”

Unbridled printing of dollars is the biggest risk to the global economy, an adviser to the Chinese central bank said in comments published on Thursday, a day after the Federal Reserve unveiled a new round of monetary easing.

German Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle said on Thursday he was concerned at U.S. efforts to stimulate growth by injecting liquidity into its struggling economy.

“I view that not without concern,” Bruederle said, adding that a variety of measures were needed to solve the problem and it was not enough to pump in liquidity alone…

Bruederle also said there was some truth to the criticism that the United States was influencing the dollar’s exchange rate with monetary policy and voiced concern about increased protectionism in different forms around the world.

Brazilian officials from the president down have slammed the Federal Reserve’s decision to depress US interest rates by buying billions of dollars of government bonds, warning that it could lead to retaliatory measures.

“It’s no use throwing dollars out of a helicopter,” Guido Mantega, the finance minister, said on Thursday. “The only result is to devalue the dollar to achieve greater competitiveness on international markets.”

Brazil, especially, seems to be treating this as a currency devaluation war, and, according to the Financial Times, really doesn’t like that.

But the worries go far beyond trade and protectionism issues brought about by fears of devaluation. It’s the domestic inflationary effects which have many–including me–worried:

Federal Reserve policies have put the US dollar the risk of crashing, which will hammer consumers through higher prices, strategist Axel Merk told CNBC…

“So we will have a cost-push inflation. We’re going to get inflation but not where Bernanke wants to have it. We’re not going to get wages to go up. We’ll get the price at the gas pump to go up instead.”

We’re right on a path towards high inflation and slow economic growth, otherwise known as “stagflation”. Except that there’s a lot more monetary expansion this time than we experienced in the 1970s. Maybe we’ll have to coin a new term, like “hyperstagflation”.

“So we will have a cost-push inflation. We’re going to get inflation but not where Bernanke wants to have it. We’re not going to get wages to go up. We’ll get the price at the gas pump to go up instead.”